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Steve Reich, “Music As a Gradual Process

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Steve Reich, “Music As a Gradual Process 492 The Recent Past, and the Present ■i I! ( Minimalism 493 I believe, The Beatles exemplify this feature, then we have reached (strange though it may To facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely seem as coincidence with our planet’s final years) a new and golden renaissance of song. gradually. Ned Rorem, “The Music of The Beades,” New Tork Review of Books, 18 January 1968. Reprinted in Performing and hstening to a gradual musical process resembles: Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman (eds.), The Lennon Companion (New York: Schirmer Books, pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest; 1988), 99-109. turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling, and 163 listening to the waves gradually bury them. Although I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing Minimalism the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself So taken for granted was the extremism of the postwar avant-garde that advanced Material may suggest what sort of process it should be run through (content composers began to worry about impending dead ends. "How can you make a suggests form), and processes may suggest what sort of material should be run through revolution," Charles Wuorinen asked an interviewer (thinking perhaps of Cage), them (form suggests content). If the shoe fits, wear it. "when the revolution before last has already said that anything goes?" That was in As to whether a musical process is realizecf through live human performance or 1962. By the end of the decade, the answer was clear: "No, it doesn't!" Many of the through some electromechanical means is not finally the main issue. One of the most most self-consciously innovative composers who came into prominence during that beautiful concerts I ever heard consisted of four composers playing their tapes in a dark decade had begun experimenting with a new kind of radicalism: radically reduced hall. (A tape is interesting when it’s an interesting tape.) means. Because of that reduction, and because of its reliance on a great deal of (near) It is quite natural to think about musical processes if one is frequently working with repetition of small units, the trend became known (after a comparable tendency in the electromechanical sound equipment. All music turns out to be ethnic music. visual arts) as minimalism. But that term, originally intended (like impressionism or Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind even baroque) as pejorative, has never sat wel I with the makers of the music, and there of complete control, and one doesn’t always think of the impersonal and complete are aspects of their products—extravagant length being one—^that definitely contra control as going together. By “a kind” of complete control, I mean that by running this dict the convenient label. The way they have talked about it suggests that "pattern and material through this process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept process" might better describe their music. At least the second term in the proposed all that results without changes. phrase was explicitly embraced by Steve Reich (1936-), one of the movement's John Cage has used processes and has certainly accepted their results, but the pioneers, in the title of one of his most characteristic statements of principle. The processes he used were compositional ones that could not be heard when the piece was main principle was that the process informing the music's unfolding (unlike the performed. The process of using the I Chin£ or imperfections in a sheet of paper to principles informing serial or aleatoric music) should be wholly available to percep determine musical parameters can’t be heard when listening to music composed that tion. It would be a mistake, however, to regard minimalism, or pattern-and-process way. The compositional processes and the sounding music have no audible connection. music, as a break with the postwar avant-garde rather than a part of it. Its crucial point Similarly, in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible. (This is a basic difference of likeness with earlier avant-garde attitudes (and even with earlier isms like neoprim between serial—basically European—music, and serial—basically American—art, where itivism and neoclassicism, both associated with Stravinsky) was its unequivocally the perceived series is usually the focal point of the work.) embraced impersonalism, its lack of interest—ringingly declared in Reich's final James Tenney said in conversation, “Then the composer isn’t privy to anything.” I sentence—in human psychology or subjectivity. Still and all, the trend was distinctive, don’t know any secrets of structure that you can’t hear. We all listen to the process and highly significant in that it was the first American classical style to exert a strong together since it’s quite audible, and one of the reasons it’s quite audible is because it’s technical and structural influence on the music of European composers. happening extremely gradually., The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when all Music as a Gradual Process the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical I do not mean the process of composition but rather pieces of music that are, literally, process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the imper sonal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products of the intended process. These might processes. The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to- include submelodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously. (Think of a round to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, or infinite canon.) and so on. I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but fr always happening throughout the sounding music. extends farther than I can hear, and that makes it interesting to listen to that musical 494 The Recent Past, and the Present ■■I I! f process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is fr. I begin to perceive these minute details when I can sustain close attention and a gradual process invites niy sustained attention. By “gradual” I mean extremely gradual; a process happening so slowly and gradually that listening to it resembles watching a minute hand on a watch—^you can perceive it moving after you stay with it a little while. Several currently popular modal musics like Indian classic and drug-oriented rock and roll may make us aware of minute sound details because in being modal (constant key center, hypnotically droning and repetitious) they namrally focus on these details rather than on key modulation, counterpoint, and other peculiarly Western devices. Nevertheless, these modal musics remain more or less strict frameworks for improvisa tion. They are not processes. The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to- note details and the overall form simultaneously. One can’t improvise in a musical process—the concepts are mutually exclusive. While performing and listening to gradual musical processes, one can participate in a particular liberating and impersonal land of rimal. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outward toward ft. Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” first published in 1969 in the catalogue to Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. Reprinted in Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965-2000, ed. Paul HiUier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 34-36. One of the most notable differences between minimalism and other avant-garde styles was the fact that minimalist pieces produced euphoria in audiences and attracted a large following. That fact was used, of course, to impugn it by those who, in keeping with older (Romantic) versions of modernism like that of T. W. Adorno (see p. 442), regarded popularity and avant-garde as mutually exclusive terms. The basis of the style's appeal is well conveyed in a memoir by Ransom Wilson, a flutist and con ductor,' who attended one of the benchmark events in the history of twentieth-century opera: the now legendary performance of Einstein on the Beach, an opera composed by Philip Glass (1937-) and staged by Robert Wilson (1941-), at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. It was not a presentation by the Metropolitan Opera company; the performers had merely rented the house on a night when it was free. A dozen or so years later, however, the Metropolitan did indeed commission an opera from Glass, called The Voyage, to be performed in 1992 to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World. It was only the third Metropolitan Opera premiere in half a century, and an impressive testimonial to the minimalist move ment's success. My first encounter with “minimalist” music was at the Metropolitan Opera House on November 28, 1976. I was in the audience for one of the sold-out performances of Einstein on the Bench, the opera by Philip Glass in collaboration with dramatist Robert Wilson.
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